2010 was a big year for us at Wave. We secured significant funding, hired a great team and took the wrappers off our product and our business model. We're really grateful for the number of people who have registered for our free small business accounting app, and for the great press and social buzz we've received over the past 5 weeks.

We look forward to continuing our mission: making your life as a small business owner easier.

We've also been working on our biggest release ever of new functionality and improvements. Our hope was to roll this out before the holidays, but we decided to test and polish a bit further before we let you play with it. However, we are ready to share the details.

There are three big shiny parts to this release:

1. reverse-engineering sales taxes

If you have an expense for $1.05, and that includes 5% sales tax, you can use our sales tax tool to properly record the $1.00 cost and $0.05 of tax. You can also specify tax amounts manually.

2. expense splitting

Imagine that you go to one of those warehouse clubs, and you buy a printer for the office, and a jumbo pack of diapers for your toddler at home. You can use the expense splitting tool to separate your original expense amount into two component parts, which you can then categorize properly.

3. FreshBooks integration

We've been hinting at this already. FreshBooks users will be able to connect their accounts with Wave. As third-party integrations go, this is a good one. Wave will bring in not just your invoice totals, but also payment status, products, customers and taxes. And Wave will update daily to reflect any changes you make in FreshBooks. It's a very sweet way for FreshBooks customers to expand into a complete accounting solution without spending any extra cash.

You can look forward to all these pieces rolling out at the very start of January.

For now, please accept our best wishes for the holiday season. We look forward to jumping back in after the break, and ensuring that we can help you get 2011 off to a great start. Our support team will be online periodically throughout the holidays, but response times may be a bit slower than normal.